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Just watched this last night and found it quite enjoyable. It made me think about the changing image of Japan here in the US when the Tokyo Olympics took place. I was about Yuuko's age in 1964 and shared her and her brother's sense of expanding opportunities in a new world order. Sadly the father is too caricatured for me to take seriously. For those who haven't seen it, the second episode of Bartender portrays a much more persuasive dramatization of the conflict between generations over family businesses in the postwar period. (It's one of my favorite single anime episodes of all time.)

I grew up with kids whose fathers had been on ships attacked by kamikaze pilots. I'd seen our soliders, sailors, and marines fight their way across the Pacific against crazed Japanese opponents in reruns of movies like Bataan and Guadacanal Diary. I well remember when "Made in Japan" meant shoddy quality; by 1971 I was driving a Japanese car. The quotation Simon posts from Gordon's history makes considerable sense to me -- the Olympics symbolically represented Japan's return to the world community.

I do have to point to one glaring error in the translation. At the beginning of the show we hear a television announcer recounting the important events of the preceding year, 1963. He clearly mentions the Kennedy assassination; I rewatched the scene a couple of times to make sure. I chalk this up to the fact that few of our fansubbers were even born when JFK was shot, while I was just coming-of-age and lived through that tumultuous decade of the sixties.

Glad to see another episode of this subbed, I'm quite enjoying it. I loved the talk in the bath about going into space and the leisure society when machines do all the work. We actually believed that back in the day!

Nice to see GotWoot pick this up, and I hope they manage to do the whole thing, as I really enjoyed the little I saw before.
So I grabbed their version, and I still love that 'leisurely walk' at the end.

Is there some reason why the GotWoot releases aren't listed on the AS page for this series?

I just happened to look at the list for March, 2012. There were only 131 torrents listed there for the entire month, and a number of those already have dead trackers! I realize that legal streaming has reduced the number of eligible series dramatically, so I'd really like to see the ones that qualify, like Showa Monogatari, actually appear on the main AS site.

So what is a hondaratta? I did a little Google searching and found this. From the song I thought they might be singing about riding a Honda scooter. Am i right?

I felt sorry for the Yamazakis; they seem like honorable people who were taken advantage of, though it did seem like the scammer was facing a difficult future. I thought the line about it being better to be cheated than to be a cheat was poignant.

I do wish the father was a more nuanced character, though. He's a bit less explosive than in the early episodes, but still not an especially likeable father. Despite his problems he shouldn't be hitting Kouhei over something like a mother's complaint about her boy being trained too hard. Glad to see Kouhei got a nice, and unexpected, present for Children's Day. (We have a Children's Day in the US, too. I remember seeing it on the calendar in our house growing up. Whenever I'd point out that it was coming up, my mother would say "every day is children's day." I never got a present on Children's Day either!)

You know that the father will not be happy about Yuuko-san having a romantic encounter in the next episode, but good for her! Speaking as a father I could never understand that point of view; I'd much prefer my daughter to be happy and in love. The manga-ka seems to have a serious crush, too. I hope it remains an unrequited yearning for everyone's sake.

The grandmother has been a bitch from the moment she first appeared in the story. Most of the time the oba-san character is a nice elderly woman who's very generous toward her grandchildren. This one is a terror.

That father is my biggest problem with this show. I know it's depicting a different time, but in any time this guy is a boorish and angry man, and in any time I have little patience for brutalizing children. And the fact that his wife so rarely says a word against his behavior makes it worse.

Apart from this I think this series is very valuable, because shows that delve deeply into the struggles of working-class people to make ends meet are extremely rare. When Kouhei says "the fact that I won't be getting side dishes for dinner is still a shock" it's easy to skim past it, but it's a pretty poignant line and sums up what the show is really all about.